


The Natural History of Monsters

by AnnabelleVeal



Category: Social Network (2010)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Phone Calls & Telephones, Post-Canon, Reconciliation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-16
Updated: 2012-12-16
Packaged: 2017-11-21 05:49:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/594152
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnnabelleVeal/pseuds/AnnabelleVeal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the eve of the settlement of <i>Saverin v. Zuckerberg</i>, not everything is unfixable.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Natural History of Monsters

**Author's Note:**

> For the prompt [“Gretchen/anyone”](http://tsn-kinkmeme.livejournal.com/12119.html?thread=21639767#t21639767) at tsn_kinkmeme. 
> 
> Title is taken from the Keats quote, “I think we may class the lawyer in the natural history of monsters.”

Gretchen is standing in front of her open refrigerator, despairing of finding anything to eat for dinner, when her phone buzzes on the counter. She sighs when she reads the number, but she answers it anyway.

“You really shouldn’t be calling me.”

“Well hello to you, too.” There’s the hum of voices and music in the background, and his speech is relaxed with a hint of a slur creeping in at the edges, so she knows he’s out drinking. Probably at that shitty whiskey and blues bar he used to drag her to in the South Bay.

“I’m serious, Sy. Do you know how many professional ethics codes you’re breaking right now?” She finds a takeaway carton with some passable carbonara and transfers it to a pot on the stove.

“Considering that the papers are already drawn up and we settle tomorrow? Relatively few I would imagine.”

The settlement. She feels a tiny swell of pride at that. Admittedly there was no way the suit would have ever gone to trial, but she still knows her work was solid. She did right by Eduardo (and it was about time _someone_ did), and if she also got the satisfaction of coming out on top against Sy, well, that was just an added bonus.

“Still, as of right now we are opposing counsel and late night phone calls are distinctly unseemly.”

“First of all, it’s barely nine. I hardly think this qualifies as ‘late night.’ And secondly,” she hears ice clinking and the sound of him swallowing (Johnnie Walker Black, on the rocks. He only takes it neat when he wins), “maybe I just wanted to call to congratulate you.”

She needs a drink. There’s most of a bottle of a middling chardonnay in the door of the fridge and she pours herself a generous glass. Cooking only for herself means no longer having to care about beverage pairings. She drinks red wines with white fish and she doesn’t give a damn, not anymore. Tonight the chardonnay will do. She takes a big, buttery gulp and prods at her pasta.

“And are you? Just calling to congratulate me, that is.”

“You presented a good case. An emotional client can be a difficult thing, but you made it work to your advantage. It would have sunk us with a jury.”

“Your client would have sunk it all on his own before anyone else had even opened their mouths. And that didn’t sound very much like ‘congratulations.’”

“My sincerest apologies: Congratulations madam, you have bested me. I do submit and humbly prostrate myself before your greatness which in this instance hath so surpassed my own.”

His tone is playful and the corners of her mouth threaten a mutinous creep upwards which she combats with another swig of wine.

“Why are you calling me, Sy?”

“Mark isn’t really as bad as he seems. Even Marylin agrees.” It’s apropos of nothing and for some reason it rankles.

“Marylin? Is that the little _shiksa_ you’re grooming for junior partner?” _Among other things_ , she wants to add but thinks better of it.

“Her mother’s Jewish, actually.”

“Well bully for her.” It comes out nastier than she intends. She changes tacks, “So you called me to talk up your client and you’re not counting this as an ethics violation _how_ exactly?”

“I didn’t call to talk about Mark. Well, not specifically anyway. More as a starting point, an analogy if you will.”

“I probably won’t, but go on.” She drains her glass, refills it.

“These proceedings have made me think about some things in a new light. While we may not agree on some specifics of the case, I think it was clear that Mark and Mr. Saverin cared about each other. Probably still do if they could get past themselves long enough to see it. And … I think the same could be true for us.”

Her thumb rubs mindlessly over her ring finger. It’s a habit she’s not broken herself of, though the ring and the faint imprint that followed are long since gone. At first there’d been a pale stripe of skin, a blatant reminder of loss, but the summer after the ring was gone she’d taken a vacation to Barbados and gotten deliciously tan. By autumn it was as if her hand had always been bare.

“They were just kids, nineteen and stupid. What was your excuse?”

“I was fifty-six and stupid? Look, Gretch –“

“— Don’t call me that.”

He continues undeterred, “Although I appreciate our ability to have an amicable professional relationship, that’s not enough for me anymore. I’m calling to apologize. I want to make things right between us.”

“Oh my god, you’re dying, aren’t you? Is it your heart? Your prostate? Did you find a strange mole? Because I can’t conceive of any possible other reason for the great Seymour Goldstein to deign to admit he can be wrong.” It’s possible she’s a little drunk by now.

“ _Gretchen_ ,” he intones, just this side of a whine, “I’m serious. I never said it back then and I should have. I’m sorry.”

“Sorry for what, exactly?”

“I don’t suppose ‘everything’ will suffice?”

She stirs the carbonara and takes another drink. “No, it won’t. If we’re going to do this, then I want to really do it. I want to hear what you think went wrong.”

Gretchen has her own ideas, of course. In her mind it probably started when he wanted kids and she didn’t. Well, she did, but she had wanted to make partner more and in those days it was an either/or proposition. In the end she made partner by thirty-eight, they still could have tried, but by then things were getting worse between them and neither was naïve enough to think a baby could fix it.

He sighs. “God, I don’t know. I didn’t try hard enough. You were too stubborn. Our jobs. Our life goals. The second Clinton administration. Take your pick. “

“Sy –“

“Okay, okay, being serious,” he pauses like he’s considering it,  “I think I first started noticing a change when you were working on the Rambus suit and I got that adjunct job at Stanford. “

She knows the time he’s thinking of: It was a major lawsuit, the sort of thing that would have been the defining moment of her career had Eduardo not walked into her office some years later, doe-eyed and shattered and saying “I want to sue Mark Zuckerberg.” She was working twelve-hour days and then coming home and working more. Meanwhile Sy was trying to balance teaching with his client load and Gretchen ended up being the thing that got cast aside to make room.

She toys with varying levels of prevarication but decides that if he’s making the effort, she will too.

“I was scared. I saw us drifting apart and I didn’t know what to do so I shut down and I helped push you away. I needed to be able to not care if you left me.” It feels strange to say it out loud, to finally own up to what she felt. What she did.

“I never would have left you,” he says it with an earnest conviction that makes her chest ache, “but you have to understand how it felt from my side. I know I was busy too, but even when we were both home we never talked. It felt more like you were my roommate than my wife, sometimes not even that. I was lonely. Desperate.”

_Lonely_. _Desperate_. The words echo in her head to the rhythm of her pounding heartbeat and her hands instinctively curl into fists. “Well then why didn’t you say something? If you didn’t want to end things then why didn’t you try to work on it instead of … instead of …” Gretchen takes a deep breath.   _Just spit it out, dammit_. “Instead of making a fool of me in front of my colleagues with a girl half your age!”

And there it was, her final straw. Sy had gotten drunk at her firm’s holiday party and kissed Angie Cooper, the bimbo of a paralegal (if she’s being fair, Angie is far from a bimbo. She’s whip-smart and an asset to the firm, not to mention she’d put her law school dreams on hold and had taken the paralegal job so she could be sole caretaker for her disabled brother after their parents died. Next to Gretchen, she’s practically a saint. Next to Gretchen a lot of people are saints).

There’s a long pause on the other end of the phone and Gretchen realizes that the background noise is gone. He must have moved outside.

When Sy finally speaks again, it’s with careful, considered words, “I’m very sorry about the party. It’s – of all the things I’m sorry about, it’s the one I most badly wish I could take back. I would like to be able to brush it off as simply a matter of my being drunk and her being there, but that’s disingenuous. It’s true, certainly, but there was also a part of me that wanted to force your hand. To see if you even cared anymore.” He swallows audibly, “To get your attention.”

She had seen them. She thinks now that maybe she was supposed to. Angie stammered out an apology and fled, while Gretchen and Sy drove home in silence, went to bed without saying a word. While he was at work the next day, she moved out of the house.

“So was my filing for divorce not enough of a reaction for you? If all you wanted was to see where I stood, then why did you go along with ending things?”

“You left! You left me and refused to say a word that wasn’t vetted by your lawyer. I couldn’t apologize, couldn’t explain, couldn’t try to talk it out because when I came home you were just gone!”

Gretchen wills herself to breathe, to calm the fine tremor in her limbs.

“And then after the divorce anytime I saw you, you were so polite and distant and, and, _bland_ to me, it was like we were strangers. I felt like you walked out and never looked back and that it had all meant nothing to you. That twenty years were erased just like that. And also,” he hesitates, “I thought you seemed happier.“

There’s a clench in her gut, like something between a sucker punch and the aftermath of food poisoning. “I wasn’t.” Even to her own ears it sounds small and fragile. She hates it.

“I fucked up,” He says it so softly she can barely hear, “but you never gave me the chance to make it right. I loved you.”

And then even softer, “I still love you.”

The carbonara is burning. She turns off the stove.

“What do you expect me to do with that, Sy?”

“I don’t expect you to do anything Gretchen.” He sounds tired, as tired as she feels. “I just needed you to know.”

They stay silent for she doesn’t know how long, each of them listening to the other’s ragged breaths. There’s nothing left to say.

Eventually propriety wins out and they make absurdly polite goodbyes (“ _Thanks for calling_ ” “ _Good talk_ ”). Proceedings start early tomorrow and they will need to appear as their normal collegial selves.

Tomorrow. As she tosses her ruined dinner into the trash and drains the last of the wine, she tries to picture it:

Tomorrow they will meet one last time over the conference table that has been home for the endless stretch of depositions. Their stony-faced young clients will officially settle while simultaneously signing away all hopes of reconciliation. When it’s over, Eduardo will expect to feel some sort of relief, the lifting of some weight, but it won’t come. Maybe she should have warned him. That when you raise your pen from the final signature, it won’t be closure or peace you feel, but a crushing finality. The irrevocability of an end.

Or maybe not.

Because maybe when she shakes Eduardo’s hand as he casts side-long glances at the back of Mark’s retreating form, she will look over and catch Sy’s eye. And maybe he will nod just slightly, with the corner of his mouth turned up. She will see Eduardo off with a gentle pat to the back and implorations to _take care_ and _call if he needs anything_ , while Sy dawdles with his bag and sends Marylin on ahead to catch up with Mark. Alone, they will lock eyes across the room and slowly, _slowly_ they will drift towards each other. And though they’ve had an end, as they take those final steps to meet in the middle, maybe they’ll start to begin again.


End file.
